There are a lot of nice things about the digital age, and the age of digital cameras in particular. As examples: you get to take twenty million photographs of your child’s first year of life, and don’t have to pay to get all those photos developed in order to find the single group shot in which everyone’s eyes are open and no one looks like they’ve been awake for 60 hours straight. You can send your mom pictures of your trip to the beach while you still have your feet planted in the sand. Several years’ worth of family photos take up no more space in your house than the three inches required to store an external hard drive.
But the albums. I never get over how much I miss having actual, hold-them-in-your-hands albums to page through. There’s just something about them that’s romantic; that makes those memories you captured feel…I don’t know, more alive, somehow.
My parents-in-law have especially lamented the fact that they don’t have many hard copies of photos of us and the kids, and so for Christmas I decided to make them an album of some favorite shots from the past few years using Canon’s hdAlbum service. I’ve thought about trying out a program like this from time to time, but have always been a little intimidated by the process. But you guys? It was SO EASY. And SO FUN.
Ok, let me lay out how it works, for those of you who’d like to try it:
- You download the hdAlbum Creation Software.
- You customize the album (I went for a landscape style, but you can also do a square or portrait), choosing everything from the number of pages to the paper type
- You add your photos and just start arranging them (you can also let the automatic wizard do the arranging for you, but I had fun with this part of the process)
- If you want, you can add little extras like graphics, captions and frames to the photos (I decided not to do this with mine).
- You submit your order, Canon professionals work their magic, and the book is mailed out to you in 3-5 days.
One note: I got some notifications that a few of my photos were a little too low-res to print at the absolute optimal quality. I was nervous that this meant that I’d end up with a book of blurry blow-ups, but virtually all of them came out beautifully. So I just wanted to mention how much I appreciate the fact that you don’t need to have professional-quality photos to end up with a gorgeous, high-quality end product.
Once the album arrived and Kendrick and I saw the result, we decided that we’re going to start making one of these every December, with our favorite shots from the preceding year. And when our kids grow up and come home and want to look through childhood photos, it won’t be a computer they reach for, but rather a series of beautifully-bound books. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s how it should be, I think.
This is a sponsored post created in collaboration with Canon. All views and opinions expressed are unbiased and based on my personal experience.
